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It’s been close to 90 years since Amelia Earhart disappeared while attempting to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe through the air, and now, it appears someone has gotten to the bottom of one of aviation’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
Amelia Earhart was just four years old when the Wright Brothers took flight for the first time in Kitty Hawk, and while she didn’t have much of an interest in that particular pastime when she was a kid, that all changed when she got the chance to interact with WWI pilots while working in a hospital in Toronto as a teenager.
After getting the opportunity to soar into the skies for the first time in her early 20s, Earhart was officially hooked, and it only took her a few years to obtain her pilot’s license (just the 16th woman in the United States to have one at the time) before setting her sights on some particular ambitious feats.
In 1928, Earhart became the first woman to complete a transatlantic flight after spending close to 21 hours on a plane with pilot Wilmer Stultz. While she acknowledged he’d done virtually all of the navigating during a journey where she’d been tasked with updating the flight log, she nonetheless earned celebrity status and set out to achieve some records she could call her own.
In 1932, she completed a solo flight from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland and became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane by herself, and in the years that followed, she continued to add unique achievements to her résumé.
In 1937, Earhart set out to become the first woman to fly around the globe, and after being forced to abort her initial attempt, she took off from Oakland that summer along with Fred Noonan to kick off the second.
On July 2nd, the duo took off from an airport in Papua New Guinea for what was supposed to be a 20-hour journey to Howland Island, a refueling outpost located around 2,500 miles away. While radio messages suggest they ended up in the vicinity of their intended destination, there was never any visual confirmation, and the Coast Guard and Navy mounted an unsuccessful search after contact was lost.
Earhart and Noonan were subsequently presumed dead, and while plenty of theories have been floated concerning their eventual fate, no one has been able to discover any concrete evidence confirming exactly what happened.
According to NBC News, retired Air Force officer Tony Romeo has spent the past year attempting to get to the bottom of the matter after founding a company called Deep Sea Vision in the hopes of finally solving the mystery.
In December, an underwater drone that was being used to scan the floor of the Pacific Ocean detected an anomaly more than 16,000 feet below the surface around 100 miles off of the coast of Howland Island, and Romeo is convinced the images shows the wreckage of the Lockheed 10-E Electra Earhart was piloting.
Romeo says he plans to return to the area with a remote vessel capable of traveling to the ocean floor in the hopes of getting a better look at the object in question and (hopefully) confirming his suspicions.